The drones were concealed under the roofs of prefabricated houses that were transported by truck to locations near the targets to be then released remotely. Since the drones had to stay charged, the houses had to have their own power systems.
The houses were equipped with solar panels and special batteries, which would “constantly power the drones”, even in cold temperatures on the chance the operation would take place in winter.
Since Russian authorities had barred items such as solar panels and those batteries from entering their country, the homes and their cargoes faced some issues at customs entering the country. “We were forced to bribe Russian customs agents,” Maliuk said.
Each person involved on the project worked on a need-to-know basis.
“The people who made the drones did not know that they were for Spiderweb. The people who made the houses did not know that these would be for aerial vehicles … Each was responsible for his own extremely important, separate direction of work,” he said.
Maliuk said that he selected the “best drone operators” for the actual attack on the airfields as the roofs of the mobile homes opened up and the drone boiled out to locate their targets. On the day of the attack, the operators gathered at the command control point at 5am.
“Their phones were taken away,” he said. “And the work began: Each was given a target [and] a specific plane was ‘allocated’. Each had a model of the terrain … the location of the houses, the route, how to fly there.”
He said the 117 drones used were the familiar first person view or FPV drones that wreak so much havoc on the battlefields, but they were equipped with a unique double warhead. The first 689gram charge was to penetrate the skin of the aircraft, allowing the second charge to explode inside.
The operators controlled the drones through “several types of communication”, but Maliuk declined to go into detail about the technology.
The drones targeted fuel tanks, the sides of the aircraft from where missiles were launched and the delicate avionics “that the enemy does not have in reserve”.
Three days after Spiderweb, Ukraine attacked the Kerch Bridge that connects Russia to the Crimea Peninsula - which it annexed illegally from Ukraine in 2014. Maliuk said that the attack involved two explosives of nearly 1130kg, instead of one as was originally reported, which were detonated underwater.
Traffic on the bridge was only temporarily suspended, however, Russian officials said.
Russia’s response was not long in coming. Two days after Spiderweb, it launched hundreds of drones and dozens of cruise and ballistic missiles across Ukraine for what it said was retaliation. Kyiv bore the brunt of the attack, with three people killed and 20 injured.
Despite the audacious nature of the drone attack and its success in hitting Russia’s bomber fleet, the aerial attacks against Ukraine have not abated; if anything they’ve been on the rise throughout June.
Russian forces have been regularly pounding Ukrainian cities in recent weeks with the latest attack taking place yesterday. A residential building collapsed because of a strike, with at least nine people killed and coming just a week after another building collapse in Kyiv killed at least 23.
Maliuk said Spiderweb was just a small demonstration of the SBU’s capabilities and showed that “it is capable of non-standard solutions that change the history of warfare”.
“This is the tip of the iceberg in our work with logistics, drones and agents,” Maliuk said.
“In Spiderweb, everything was brought together into a single whole.”
